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Scoring Champ May Not Be Best Scorer

Kevin Durant has managed to score more than 28 points per game this season while taking fewer than 18 shots per game from the field.

It appears that Carmelo Anthony has sewn up his first career NBA scoring title, unseating the three-time defending champ, Kevin Durant. It’s a deserving crown for Anthony, who has gotten in position to take the title with one of the most efficient scoring performances of his career. But Durant’s scoring performance has been even better, showing that there’s more to elite point production in basketball than scoring the most points per game.

With just a game left in the season for most teams — including Anthony’s Knicks and Durant’s Thunder — Anthony is averaging 28.7 points per game, to Durant‘s 28.1 and the injured Kobe Bryant‘s 27.3. The Knicks, Thunder and fourth-place LeBron James‘s Heat all have clinched their playoff positions, so James is unlikely to play, let alone score the 171 points he’d need to lap an idle Anthony. So it’s safe to award Anthony the points-per-game title, traditionally called the scoring title in the NBA.

But points per game, by itself, isn’t the best measure of how good a player is at scoring. Given two players of equal abilities, the one who takes more shots will score more points. And Anthony takes a lot of shots: 22.2 per game this year, compared to 17.7 for Durant and 17.8 for James. Anthony really won the scoring title in April, having entered the month with an average of 27.5 points per game to Durant’s 28.3. This month, Anthony has taken at least 21 shots from the field in every game. Durant hasn’t taken more than 21 shots from the field in any April game.

Anthony’s April wasn’t just about chucking up shots: He also hit a lot of them, far more than he usually does. He hit 54% of his shots in the month, including 61% in the first five games, while scoring at least 36 points in each game, the last five wins of the Knicks’ 13-game winning streak. Those are big improvements over his 45% field-goal percentage for the season. In those five games, Anthony’s true-shooting percentage — an adjusted field-goal percentage that takes into account shooting from behind the three-point line and the free-throw line — was a stellar 70%, which is good enough to be the highest in the NBA this season, if Anthony had maintained it for the whole year.

But to Durant, a 70% true-shooting percentage over five games is nothing extraordinary. He did it over five different five-game periods this season, including three non-overlapping ones. His TS% in April has been even better than Anthony’s: 68% to Anthony’s 62%, as Melo went a bit cold after his five-game run. Meanwhile, before that run began Anthony had no five-game period this season with a TS% above 65.1%. Throughout the season, Durant has been almost as good as that, wit a true-shooting percentage of 64.7%, second-best in the NBA. James’s 64% is third-best. Just four players in NBA history have averaged at least 25 points per game while playing in at least 60 games and shooting with a higher true-shooting percentage than Durant has this season — and only one more has done so while topping James’s mark.

None of this makes Anthony anything less than an elite scorer — and one of the very best during April. His production level is particularly impressive since Durant’s Thunder average nearly four more possessions per 48 minutes than do the Knicks. Anthony has shouldered far more of the shooting and scoring load than Durant has, and in the season’s crucial last month, he was extraordinary at converting those possessions into points. If he could maintain that level all the time, Anthony would sit alongside or ahead of Durant and James on more leaderboards than the scoring one.